Catching Up

It's some time since I've written to my journal, so I thought I should catch up with it and mention the (few) Perl-related things I've done since last time.

My last job didn't work out - although I did some interesting things with Class::DBI, Template Toolkit and Subversion - so for the last four weeks I've been commuting into London. It's been fun but tiring. I've discovered that I find commuting harder than I expected.

I gave a lightning talk on Class::DBI and wizard interfaces to London.pm in July, which described using a series of subclasses, each with more functionality, to model the evolution of objects through a wizard interface. You can construct an object using any class in the series, which automatically reblesses the object according to the amount of information currently known about it.

A few people I talked to seemed sceptical about this idea: Why bother reblessing things instead of using one class and checking parameters? I think the best answer is that you can map interfaces to the series of classes. Rather than having to perform tests against an object to see which stage of the interface to display, you can display the interface associated with a particular class.

I hope to write this up coherently at some point, ideally abstracting the code as a CPAN module. It's all a matter of time, or the lack of it.

Lastly, I've almost finished writing my paper for this year's YAPC::Europe. It's overdue, which is frustrating, but I've felt too tired to give it the attention it deserves until this weekend. I'm going to practice it at London.pm's technical meeting on 9th September. It's turned out more Webby than Perly, but I think it's still relevant for people working in both these areas. Perl developers who have no interest in the Web will find it very dull, though.

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